Tuesday, 12 July 2016

The Royal Norfolk Show 2016

I am born and bred in Norfolk and I have never been to The Royal Norfolk Show can you believe?! It’s the UK’s largest two-day county show and aims to celebrate Norfolk’s heritage. Last year I went as a volunteer and thought it looked great but I was restricted to what I could do on site as I couldn’t gather freebies, make purchases or try the local delicacies in food and drink. This year I decided I wanted to go. The Norfolk Show ran for 2 days from Wednesday 29th June – Thursday 30th June and is around the same time every year. I decided I still wanted to volunteer so on the Wednesday I did that and scoped the place out ready to visit as a paying customer on the Thursday.

The gates open from 8am and I was keen to get there early. I don’t live too far away from the show but the traffic can get tedious! I contemplated walking but the Showground is a large area (I recently ran the race for life there) and from experience last year the miles walking around the show soon rack up! I chose to buy my tickets online at a discounted price. For the 2 of us plus parking came to £46, this would have been £60 if we paid on the day.

We arrived in good time, the traffic leading up to the show is a bit crazy and it did take us about 45 minutes to drive 3 miles but I was happy to arrive nice and early just after opening time. There is so much to see at the show from livestock to tractors, horse shows, flower shows and plenty of stalls offering freebies. My favourite place was the food hall! So many different delicious local food and drink items up for grabs! I brought my camera with me but forgot to take my memory card – blogger problems! Thankfully my boyfriend had his camera and took all of these lovely photos for me and let me borrow his camera when I saw something I liked.

As I mentioned before my favourite place was the food hall! There was cheeses, pork, chocolate, bread, brownies, drinks and everything and anything you can imagine. For lunch I decided to have something rather unhealthy from The Chocolate Fondue Company, a kebab stick with fresh strawberries and marshmallows soaked in melted milk chocolate and drizzled with white chocolate. The best £4 I have ever spent! Me and James also decided to get some Posh Pop drinks from Breckland Orchard, these were really refreshing and at 4 for £6 at the show, a great deal for such a great tasting treat.

We also had a look around all of the animal pens and saw pigs, sheep and cows. I loved looking at the pigs, pigs are great! We also watched a couple of the livestock shows that were going on throughout the day where they were judging sheep and cows. I felt like a proper Norfolk Bumpkin!

We wandered for around 7 miles in total, when my legs finally started to give up we had reached the flower show. I saw so many beautiful flowers and a large range of cactai (my favourite!). It was nice slowly wandering around and when we came to the end of the tent there was a cookery demonstration on. They were demonstrating how to make cakes and chocolates using a range of flowers in the ingredients such as lavender and hibiscus. Unfortunately we couldn’t stay to the end to have a taster as we had to leave, but they looked and smelled lovely!

Does your county have an annual show? Is this something you would go along to?